More Like Audrey Sickburn

Audrey is an Australian comedy film that strictly follows the first – and only – requirement of an Australian comedy film: it’s hanging shit on the losers who live in the suburbs. Those bastards have had it too good for too long, what with all their stunted narcissistic dreams and malformed personalities reflecting the dark side of the Lucky Country and so on and so forth can we have a Film Australia grant now?

Audrey is about a typical suburban family, in that we’re introduced to the father as he wanks into one of those hand held fake plastic vaginas, only he’s interrupted by his family who are all horrified and then the dog runs off with it. At least now we know he’s a wanker.

There’s also two daughters. One of which is good looking so she’s a bitch, while the other is in a wheelchair but she’s also kind of bitchy so fair enough. The real story is the mother. She used to be a soap actress largely remembered for not being on any of the popular soaps but still giving a “suck it losers, I’ve made it” speech at the Logies right before it all fell apart.

The good-looking daughter is Audrey so you might think this is her story. But no. No sooner have we got to know her deal – hates her family, wants to run away with her sleazy musician boyfriend, is being forced into an acting career by her stage mum – than she falls off the roof and ends up in a coma. The big comedic twist is that this instantly improves everyone else’s lives.

Suddenly the wheelchair daughter is popular and famous and waving a fencing rapier around. The dad is off having gay sex with a porn producer while now also boning his wife (seems they’re in an open marriage, which maybe someone could have mentioned earlier). And the mum? Her acting career is back in business now that she’s pretending to be her daughter at some dodgy acting school.

Surprisingly, this is probably the best stretch of the movie. It turns out that seeing people be happy and successful is more entertaining than having them sling shit at each other and everyone around them.

Anyway, Audrey’s coma can’t last, we all know that. Nobody likes spoilers so lets just say you will in no way be surprised by anything that happens in the final third of the movie, unless you were actually paying attention to the first two thirds of the movie in which case there are a number of scenes that feel like the kind of thing that should happen but don’t actually flow on logically from anyone’s behaviour.

But who cares about story or character or anything like that. Is it funny? Yeah, nah. There are some semi-decent jokes scattered around the place. But a lot of the comedy is the kind of thing that you can imagine people saying “yeah, that’ll be funny” rather than actually laughing at.

For example, there’s a high school benefit concert for Audrey that’s the kind of thing Chris Lilley was doing 20 years ago and it wasn’t much chop then. Come to think of it, a pushy suburban stage mum is also pretty Chris Lilley. And while the Christian Porn the dad gets mixed up in is more explicit than anything Lilley ever got up to, the basic concept is very much in his wheelhouse. Remember “cringe comedy”? Sorry for reminding you.

So the comedy feels like an afterthought. It’s a collection of old gags from a previous generation thrown into the mix because they pitched a “dark suburban comedy” and now they have to follow through. Fortunately, a vibrating dildo is always funny, right?

There’s probably a case to be made that the real comedy here is the parody of Australian suburbia. But yeah, piss off with that. At (the very) best this is a parody of other, older Australian films. It’s a bunch of sub-Kath & Kim level cliches only with the heart replaced by a sneering dismissiveness and some jokes about acting school classes where you have to pretend to be a tree.

It’s weird to remember there was a period there where The Castle was seen by some as being patronising towards its working class suburban subjects. Presumably this was because people actually saw The Castle, unlike the dozens of other Australian “comedies” that treated anyone living more than 20 minutes from the center of a capital city as a tasteless dimwit driven by animal urges one step removed from the gutter. Australian film has a long and largely forgettable history of sneering trips to the suburbs and beyond to depict just about everyone who dwells there as some kind of freak, and calling your half-arsed Wake in Fright-meets-Strictly Ballroom remake a black comedy exploring the dark recesses of suburban narcissism or some shit doesn’t make it any funnier.

Mind you, considering the extremely slim pickings this year Audrey is still probably the best Australian comedy movie of 2024.